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How to Improve Customer Loyalty Using Existing Assets

September 22, 2009

By Patrick BarnardGroup Managing Editor, TMCnet

Unless you are a niche marketer with just an unbelievably charismatic brand and an utterly enthralling, completely unique, out-of-this-world product line, chances are you’re going to have a hard time holding onto your customers in this economy, even if you know them well.

Why? Because with the Internet being what it is today, consumers know that they can get just about anything they want from any two or more sources. So if a customer has one bad experience – a rude call center agent, or the order that for whatever reason never shipped (even though the agent said it did) – they basically have no reason to do business with you ever again (unless, of course, your only competitor does the same thing to them, only worse).

Making customer retention even more challenging is the fact that your customers can more easily than ever share their bad experiences with others on the Web -- by way of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogs, wikis, YouTube (News - Alert), sometimes even your own Website, if you happen to have a section where customers can post comments on products and services.

As a result, customer loyalty has become more important than ever – lose one customer to a bad service experience and chances are you’ve lost five, ten, maybe even dozens of potential customers, once the word gets out. Recent studies show that about 57 percent of customers leave a merchant after just one bad service experience. What’s more, it costs seven times more to secure a new customer than to retain an existing one.

Meanwhile companies everywhere are cutting staff in their call centers, due to the recession, and call center managers are being asked to do “more with less” – not exactly the ideal formula for improving customer service and reigning in the customers you already have. In addition, financial constraints are preventing some companies from investing in the technology they need in order to gain accurate “customer intelligence,” which is increasingly being viewed as the key to delivering a superior customer experience.

To learn more about how you can improve your customer loyalty using your existing assets, be sure to check out the upcoming free Webinar, “Cracking the Code: Five Steps to Intelligent Growth in Customer Service,” sponsored by Convergys (News - Alert), Datamonitor and Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

This informative webinar -- to be held at 12 noon, ET, tomorrow, Wednesday, Sept. 23 -- will feature presentations by Daniel Hong, lead analyst of Datamonitor, and Mike Betzer (News - Alert), president of the relationship technology management line of business for Convergys. Together they will provide an enlightening look at current market trends and will explain not only what merchants can do to retain their customers, but how they can go one step further and turn routine customer interactions into customer transactions.

All registrants will be included on the priority list to receive the accompanying Datamonitor whitepaper “Cracking the Code: Five Steps to Intelligent Growth in Customer Service.”

To register for this informative Webinar, click here.

Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard

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